Nuffnang Philippines confirms compromised database

Nuffnang may be the most successful local online advertiser in the country specifically focused on blogs. But like any other online brands that maintain database of users, they are not susceptible to hackers as well.

It was first week in August when registered Nuffnangers, a name coined to Nuffnang advertisers, are said to received job offers from a certain platehead email domain. A week after, another job offer was sent under hack.ph. Both offers seemed to be too good to be true. To date, there are no confirmations yet if the two job offers were indeed related with Nuffnang Philippines though most of the bloggers who received the email messages believed that these spam emails came from Nuffnang’s database.

Today, Nuffnang Philippines released an official statement confirming that their database has been compromised. This confirmation though did not specifically mention the two names that were first associated to the spam incidents. Below are parts of Abe Olandres’s, Nuffnang Philippines’ Country Manager, letter to their advertisers:

“It has come to our attention that our database has been compromised and some information about your account has been illegally retrieved.”

“Our servers are centralized in Malaysia, including our R&D which is also based there. We have requested them to thoroughly investigate this incident, and after doing a security sweep, have made additional necessary precautions to prevent this from happening in the future.”

“The copied information included names, emails, and URLs. This is the reason why some of you might have received spam email in the recent week. While the spam emails did not originate from our servers, we detected that at least one (1) email was sent out to that list.”

The letter assured Nuffnang bloggers that they are doing their best to strengthen their security system and advised subscribers to change their Nuffnang account passwords.

Fjordan Allego aka Fjordz is a Network Security Officer in one of the leading financial firms in the Philippines. He maintains a couple of blogs where he shares his views on various topics that he finds interesting. A self-confessed introvert who's mostly active in social media, Fjordz also loves to travel and explore the wonders of the world.